This paper analyzes long-term effects of skilled-worker immigration on productivity for the Huguenot migration to Prussia. In 1685, religiously persecuted French Huguenots settled in Brandenburg- Prussia and compensated for population losses due to plagues during the Thirty Years' War. We...

The US tolerates more inequality than Europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than Europe?s, though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century. We extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10,000...

We reanalyze Long and Ferrie's data. We find that the association of occupational status across generations was quite similar over time and place. Two significant differences were: (i) American farms in 1880 were far more open to men who had nonfarm backgrounds than were American farms in 1973...

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions....

We analyze the emergence of the first socioeconomic institution in history limiting fertility: west of a line from St. Petersburg to Trieste, the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) reduced childbirths by approximately one-third between the fourteenth and eighteenth century. To explain the rise of...

We respond to several criticisms by Avery Guest and Michael Hout (2013) and Yu Xie and Alexandra Killewald (2013) to Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie (2013). We do not dispute Guest and Hout's characterization of the importance of total mobility in addition to relative mobility. We find much in...

We analyze under what conditions intermarriage can be used as an indicator of tolerance, and whether such tolerant attitudes persisted in Germany during the twentieth century. We find strong evidence for the persistence of tolerant attitudes towards intermarriage with Jews. At the same time, our...

The interplay between religion and the economy has long occupied social scientists. We construct a unique panel of income and Protestant church attendance using 175 Prussian counties, presented in six waves from 1886 to 1911. The data reveal a marked decline in church attendance coinciding with...